Page 131 of The Outsider

Asha huffed. “No. I didn’t believe Claire when she told me about the Valley. I assumedyouwere lying to her—dangling a carrot. She’s always been such a doe-eyed innocent that I knew she’d fall for that kind of thing from the first guy to sweet-talk her a little.”

“Do they know about the Valley?” I gritted out, giving her a sharp jab with the rifle. “The people you were going to sell us to.”

“They never responded to my radio calls,” Asha replied bitterly, and I relaxed a little.

“Radio calls?”

“Yeah,” she said. “There’s a compound a few hundred kilometres from here. The Delta. I tried calling them. I intended to trade the information about the Valley to them in exchange for residency.”

I frowned. “Why would they care?”

“Don’t be stupid. You know that there’s nobody else in the Wasteland like you guys. Sure, you live like a bunch of hick farmers, but you think they want you to have electricity? Technology? That’s not the kind of thing Wastelanders can be trusted with. So, they’d take it.”

She gave a grim smile. “Also, I think they’d have been very interested to know that the PNCs you have were acquired less than honourably, from another compound. I’d say they’d see them as stolen property, and not something Wastelanders should have.”

“But they were from another compound,” I said, carefully controlling my voice, “so why would it matter?”

Asha gave me that familiar look that said she thought I was dumb as a box of rocks.

“They’re connected,” she said slowly, as if speaking to a very stupid child. “All the compounds are. They’re all owned by the same people.”

I stared at her. “Which is…who?”

She shrugged. “Nobody really knows except at the highest levels. Very hush-hush.”

“Why wouldn’t Claire have told me?” I said, half to myself.

“She doesn’t know,” Asha replied. “Few do. My mother was an ambassador to the other compounds, though she kept her work secret. I only learned about it when I went back to the Cave. When I visited my childhood home, there was plenty there. It made sense in retrospect;she told me shortly before the attack that she feared something bad was happening…and she was right.”

“The Order,” I said, and she nodded before I remembered the detail that had bothered me. “You said you used a radio. How…?”

She just stared at me. And reality hit me like a bucket of cold water.

“You attacked Danny that night and took his radio.”

“Zach did,” Asha replied. “I told him we needed a working radio, and he knew where to get one.”

“You couldn’t call from inside the Valley, though. The reception to the outside is shit.”

Asha shrugged again. “Why do you think I’ve spent so much time on scav missions? The Post was the only place I could get a decent signal. Anywhere north of that is too remote.”

I thought about what Zach had said. “He did all that just to live in that stupid compound with you?”

To my surprise, Asha laughed with real humour.

“You met the guy, right?” she said, nodding towards his corpse a few feet away. “He was an arrogant piece of shit looking to get his dick wet, just like every Wastelander I ever met. Manipulating him was too fucking easy. He believed everything I told him after a few blowjobs. Thought we’d run away to the compound together, that I was as in love with him as he was with himself. Fucking idiot.”

She spat in the direction of his body, and I winced. Fuck her for making me feel kind of sorry for that scumbag, even for half a second.

“If you hadn’t killed him, I would’ve,” she continued.

My stomach was in knots. This woman had lived in my house. She’d dated my sister. Met everyone I cared about. I may not have liked her, but I never thought that she’d be this…cold. Calculated. Brutal.

Asha shrugged, oblivious to my disgust. “I wanted Claire to come with me. I thought if she saw the truth—that the Valley was no better than anywhere else in the Wasteland—she’d come around. But you brainwashed her.”

I would’ve laughed at the irony there, but I was busy coming to another horrible realization.The woodshed burning down. The bloody message on the classroom wall.

“Fucking hell,” I muttered, mopping my face with my hand. “You terrorized her? For months? And all so you could go back to living in a fantasyworld?”

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